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The answer is no, English is easier to learn for Chinese-speakers than Chinese is for English speakers. Chinese and Japanese are objectively much harder, becaus

by Zarel 8y ago

The answer is no, English is easier to learn for Chinese-speakers than Chinese is for English speakers. Chinese and Japanese are objectively much harder, because of how kanji/hanzi work. http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-mandarin-20160603-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-mandarin-20160... (English is, in turn, harder than languages such as Spanish because of its spelling weirdnesses.) The early weirdnesses stop mattering pretty quickly. Stuff like irregular verbs, you just get used to. The things that make languages hard are things that still trip you up years into learning the language. In English, that'd be spelling. We have spelling bees! For a lot of languages, the idea of a spelling bee is unthinkable, because spelling is just not a problem. But in English, we have spellcheck on computers, we have native speakers constantly correcting each others' spelling. In Chinese, that'd be reading/writing characters. At least in English, if you forget how to spell a word, you can just spell it out phonetically. In Chinese, there are thousands of characters, and if you forget how to write one, you're screwed. In a famous essay, someone forgot how to write "sneeze" in Chinese, and asked his friends at the Chinese equivalent of Harvard, and none of his friends could remember, either (we're talking native Chinese speakers in the PhD program for Chinese). http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

chillacy 8y ago
A good case but I'm looking for something more objective, like actual studies counting the hours. Moser is a famous text that gets posted on HN a lot but this is basically the most critical text there is, and it gets to the point where he's unfair and contrived, since it's written to be comical as opposed to accurate.
matz1 8y ago
'Why x is so damn hard' can be written for any other language. All language are equally complex. chinese writing might be hard but it makes up in other area.
- Zarel 8y ago
  You can't make such a strong claim as "all languages are equally complex" with zero evidence, especially if you're replying to a comment that gives plenty of evidence that Chinese is harder. I will grant that Chinese is easy in some ways and hard in others. I'm saying that most differences in difficulty fade away, years into learning a language. The things that remain are disproportionately worse, for Chinese.

by Zarel 8y ago

chillacy 8y ago

A good case but I'm looking for something more objective, like actual studies counting the hours. Moser is a famous text that gets posted on HN a lot but this is basically the most critical text there is, and it gets to the point where he's unfair and contrived, since it's written to be comical as opposed to accurate.

matz1 8y ago

'Why x is so damn hard' can be written for any other language. All language are equally complex. chinese writing might be hard but it makes up in other area.

Zarel 8y ago
You can't make such a strong claim as "all languages are equally complex" with zero evidence, especially if you're replying to a comment that gives plenty of evidence that Chinese is harder. I will grant that Chinese is easy in some ways and hard in others. I'm saying that most differences in difficulty fade away, years into learning a language. The things that remain are disproportionately worse, for Chinese.